


like an open book

by skeilig



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Blow Jobs, Come as Lube, Deadlights (IT), First Time, Frottage, Getting Together, Hand Jobs, Injury Recovery, Intimacy, Introspection, Love Confessions, M/M, Mentioned Myra Kaspbrak, Multiple Orgasms, Mutual Pining, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:40:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27820876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig/pseuds/skeilig
Summary: Eddie’s had this alarming habit recently of staring at Richie’s face while Richie is talking and completely tuning out whatever Richie is saying to instead scrutinize each one of his physical characteristics and decide whether or not he finds them attractive. It’s probably flattering because, on the whole, his judgment is: attractive. But the entire exercise has an air of anger and incredulity that makes it difficult for Richie to feel too smug about it. Eddie thinks Richie’s ears are cute and he wants to bite them, but he’s fucking pissed about it, apparently.Or, Richie has a side-effect from the deadlights: he can read Eddie’s mind.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 147
Kudos: 816





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rating for final chapter!

Richie was never actually unconscious, but that’s news to him. 

He doesn’t remember anything that happened between the SCARY, VERY SCARY, and NOT SCARY AT ALL doors—and the feeling of Eddie clutching onto his wrist—and now, sitting in a hospital room, and staring at Eddie who’s sitting in the chair across from his bed, looking at his phone, one leg crossed over his knee. His face is freshly bandaged, a pure square of white taped to the hollow of his cheek.

Richie can hear Eddie’s voice in a disembodied way, like it’s playing in his own head. Eddie’s lips aren’t moving. _Fuck, I have to call her_. It’s like Richie can see Eddie’s phone, scrolling in his hand. Eddie navigates to the contact for _Marsh, Beverly_ and begins to type a message. 

Richie shakes his head. His imagination feels weirdly vivid, loud and intrusive. “Eddie,” he says. 

Eddie hums, doesn’t look up. “What’s up?” He keeps tapping on his phone. 

“Where am I?” Richie asks. 

“You’re in the hospital in Derry,” Eddie answers, strangely dispassionate. 

Richie looks around at his surroundings. He feels… fine. He’s in the hospital bed but he’s not hooked up to anything; although he is wearing a boot on his ankle, and it throbs dully underneath probably some pain numbing agent. “Why?”

“You fell, you got a concussion. And you sprained your ankle pretty bad.” Eddie still doesn’t look up, and keeps typing as he recites this information. For Richie, it’s the first time he’s hearing it, but Eddie seems like he’s said this a thousand times. “They did a CT scan and you’re gonna be fine, they’re just keeping you here until you start getting your memory back.”

“Oh.” 

Eddie clicks his phone locked and stands up, fixing his gaze on Richie. “Oh, and– we killed It.” 

“Oh,” Richie says again, and he– he still doesn’t _remember_ , but somehow he sees it: his own face, his other friends, standing in a circle in the cavern, crowding around the shriveled form of the clown. The vision is from Eddie’s perspective. It’s not a memory, it’s something Richie’s never seen before, but it plays in his head like one. 

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I’ll tell you again in five minutes. Bev’s gonna come in and be with you for a sec, okay? I have to make a phone call.” 

He leaves the room as Bev brushes past him in the doorway, saying “Hi,” and squeezing his shoulder. 

“How you feeling, Richie?” she asks as she flops into the chair Eddie just vacated. 

“Um, fine,” he says. “I have a concussion?”

“Sure do,” she says with the same casual tone as Eddie. 

“Did I just wake up?” 

“No, you’ve been conscious the whole time, asking questions, but you haven’t remembered anything, just keep…” She makes a loopy rewind gesture with a finger next to her head. “Resetting.” 

“Oh.” Richie nods slowly. He can hear Eddie’s voice in the hallway, on the phone. But it’s not coming from all the way down the hall because he’s not shouting, he’s speaking in a tense near-whisper, gripping his phone with both hands. _No, Myra, I’m not– I’m not coming back._ Somehow, Richie can hear it as clearly as if Eddie were right next to him. “I’m pretty sure I was asleep,” Richie says to Bev, trying to ignore the persistent hum of Eddie’s voice in his head. “I don’t remember anything.”

“You were not asleep,” Bev tells him. 

“I remember…” It’s starting to come back to him. “We went down there, and the ritual didn’t work, and I ran away with Eddie, and there were three doors? And then we heard Mike yelling so we ran after him and that’s… I don’t remember anything after that.” 

Bev glances up, looking interested for the first time. “Oh, that’s new. You remember being down there?” 

“Yeah?” Richie says. 

She springs up onto her feet and steps toward him, peering closely into his eyes as if that would tell her anything about his mental state. “I thought you didn’t even remember coming to Maine. This is good. Have you told Eddie? The doctor?” 

“I _just_ woke up,” Richie says, feeling lost and a little frustrated. 

“You haven’t been unconscious at all,” Bev tells him patiently, patting his cheek. The gesture feels condescending. “Like I said. Apart from the deadlights and, like, maybe ten seconds after you hit the ground.” 

“I– really? Wait, the deadlights?” Richie repeats, paling a little. “Was I…?”

“I’m gonna tell the nurse you’re getting some memories back,” Bev says, stepping back toward the door. “And you haven’t reset in a few minutes, that’s actually– that’s really good, Richie. They might let you out of here soon.” 

She leaves the room and Richie is alone. “Reset?” he mumbles to himself. He smooths the blankets over his lap. This whole thing has a strange air to it, like his friends are all playing a joke on him. Maybe more alarming than even the hours of memory loss, he’s still having intrusive thoughts that barge into his mind wearing Eddie’s voice, and they’re impossible to ignore. 

He’s angry. He’s on the phone with his wife, huddled in the corner of the waiting room down the hall, eyes pinched shut as he repeats himself. _I’m not coming home. I can’t talk about this right now. I’m fine, I just–_

 _Are you leaving me?_ she asks, voice demanding in his ear. _You’re leaving me and you can’t even have the decency to tell me to my face? I won’t accept this, Eddie._

Richie shakes his head, trying to clear the voices. It’s a– sick fantasy, maybe? Eddie breaking up with his wife over the phone because he wants to stay here with Richie? Weird. He doesn’t want to think about that anymore. 

Bev interrupts, waving and calling to him from across the room, and Eddie gets off the phone, hangs up on Myra mid-word—how does Richie _know_ any of this, Jesus—and the two of them rush back to Richie’s room, arriving before the nurse does. 

Eddie crowds in on him, brow steeply furrowed, eyes flickering all over Richie’s face. “Do you remember what happened?” 

“I remember what you told me,” Richie says, honestly. “I don’t remember what happened, though.”

“That’s good,” Eddie says, glancing at Bev. “That’s really good, Richie.” 

After the doctor comes in and asks Richie some questions, and answers Eddie’s questions, and clears him to go home, Eddie leads Richie out of the hospital, which is still confusing to Richie, since he doesn’t remember coming here at all. Plus, Richie is on crutches now and he’s not yet getting the hang of it. Eddie guides him and opens doors for him, but he’s distracted. He feels gross from cleaning himself up in the bathroom sink and he hasn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours and he wants to brush his teeth more than anything; the fresh stitches in his cheek pull at his skin and his mouth tastes like iron. He’s still replaying the conversation with Myra in his head, wincing and wishing he’d said something different. 

Richie blinks hard. Maybe he should have asked the doctor about this; is it a side-effect of the concussion? He’s had enough hallucinations over the past few days to totally rule out the possibility, but those were of the supernatural variety. He’s always been too nervous to try any hallucinogenic drugs, confident that his brain would jump at the opportunity to terrify and torture him, and therefore always preferred drugs that slowed or numbed him. 

“Did they give me any drugs?” Richie asks.

Eddie, holding a door open, glances back. “Um. Just, like, ibuprofen. And they gave you some oxygen when you first got here. Why? Do you feel weird? Do you need more?” 

“No, I feel fine,” Richie lies. 

Eddie drives Richie and Bev back to the Townhouse. Bev had been back earlier to clean up and sleep a little, but Eddie hasn’t been here since the night they checked in. Neither has Richie, for that matter, and now that he thinks about it he is exhausted. 

“Do I get to sleep, or do you guys have to keep me awake so I don’t slip into a coma or whatever?” he asks while they trudge up the stairs. Richie plants his crutches on each carpeted step and Eddie follows close behind him, a hand hovering over the small of his back to steady him if needed. 

“Nah, you can sleep,” Eddie says. “That’s a myth, that you have to stay awake. I’ll keep an eye on you, though.”

“Eddie, no,” Bev says, throwing him a glance. “You need to sleep, too. I’ll stay with Richie.” 

They’re standing in the upstairs hallway now, lingering outside Richie’s door. Eddie hesitates, and Richie’s mind floods with an unprompted vision: the two of them lying in the heavy-quilted queen bed together, Richie sleeping on his back while Eddie lies on his side facing him. The thought has a warmth to it, and it’s distinctly from Eddie’s point of view, but it sours with sickly shame. 

“Yeah, of course,” Eddie says quickly. “Thanks, Bev.” He lifts his head to make fleeting not-quite-eye-contact with Richie. “Hope you sleep well.” 

It’s mid-morning and it’s bright outside, but inside Richie’s room Bev draws the dark velvety curtains over the window and Richie crawls into bed. He evidently got cleaned up at some point at the hospital, not that he can remember it. He’s wearing different clothes. This is a bit disturbing. At least he has a mental respite now that Eddie’s down the hallway, his voice blurrier in Richie’s head. 

Bev sighs as she settles down next to him. “Eddie was good to have around, you know,” she tells him. “He went right into doctor mode, like he used to. ‘Richie has a concussion, he’s going to ask the same questions over and over, everyone just needs to answer them.’” She does an impression of Eddie when she says it; not much effort, but she captures the cadence of his voice when he gets high-strung and starts ordering people around. Although it sounds more like an impression of thirteen year-old Eddie than of his current self; maybe that’s a more familiar version to Bev. “It was kind of sweet, actually.” Bev turns her head on the pillow to smile at Richie. “I’ve never seen him that patient. At least not with you.” 

Bev laughs; Richie’s stomach swoops. “Probably ‘cause he knew I wouldn’t remember it.” 

“Oh, your foot,” Bev says, suddenly sitting up. She grabs a pillow to slide under his ankle-braced leg. “Supposed to keep it elevated. Do you think you need more ice or something? Wanna take something before you sleep? Maybe I should’ve let Eddie dote on you all day. I kinda zoned out when he was giving me the run-down.” 

“Nah, I’m fine,” Richie says, and he falls asleep shortly after.

* * *

When Richie wakes up, Bev is gone, but now Eddie sits in the armchair in the corner, chewing his lower lip and staring at his phone. He’s thinking about Myra again.

Richie didn’t sleep off whatever he was experiencing yesterday—or, this morning? His sense of time is fucked, but he feels pretty good, alert. Except for the fact that Eddie’s intrusively loud worries about his wife are playing on loop in his head. 

“I survived,” Richie announces, his voice rough with sleep. 

Eddie glances up at him, smiling a little. “Slept well? It’s after 7pm. It’s gonna take me days to get my sleep schedule back in order. You know, staying awake as long as we did? It’s really fucking dangerous. I don’t know why we didn’t just sleep the first night–”

“Yeah, why didn’t we all put the murder-clown hunt on hold to get a solid eight hours?” 

“You know what I mean,” Eddie snaps. “We would’ve been better equipped if we weren’t all sleep-deprived.” 

“We made out of it fine, though,” Richie points out, smiling a little. 

“Says the guy who doesn’t remember any of it,” Eddie grumbles. 

_(Why are you being such a dick?)_

Richie hears this clearly in Eddie’s voice although his lips don’t move. 

“Bev said you were really nice to me when I was doing the short-term memory loss thing,” Richie says, grinning wider. “So you can’t fool me. I know you’re just grumpy because this place has the worst watered-down coffee…”

Eddie falters, glancing at him, the reaction sharp enough that Richie stops speaking. “How did you–?” 

“Intuition,” Richie lies, his pulse jumping. “And I can smell it.”

Eddie rears his head back in surprise and turns away slightly to breathe into his cupped hand. 

Okay, so that was probably weirder than Richie just admitting what he’s increasingly sure is the truth: He can read Eddie’s mind.

Over a few ordered pizzas in the Townhouse lobby, Richie works out the rules of this brave new world, as best as he can tell. He experiences Eddie’s thoughts like they’re his own, whether that’s auditory, visual, emotional. He can see what Eddie sees, as if peering over his shoulder. The connection is stronger when Eddie is close, and stronger when Eddie’s emotions are intense. Richie can’t pick up on the thoughts of anyone else, which is a relief; it’s hard enough acting normal when he knows that Eddie’s sitting here, contemplating divorce. 

He hasn’t told any of the Losers yet—hasn’t told _Myra_ yet—but Richie knows it, which feels unfair. Of course he can’t say anything about it, so he tries to focus on putting away most of a thin crust pepperoni pizza by himself. 

“I’m going with Ben to his place in the Catskills,” Bev says, once the conversation turns to what’s next for everybody. 

“Place in the _Catskills_ ,” Bill repeats emphatically, and Ben flushes, respectably humble about the material evidence of his success. 

“You’re all invited, by the way,” Ben offers. “If you need to hide out from the real world a while longer.” 

Richie can feel Eddie’s eyes on him, more literally than usual. He can see his own face from that unfamiliar outside perspective, and he knows that Eddie wants Richie to take Ben up on his offer, wants some excuse to spend more time together. Eddie doesn’t want to go home, but more than that he wants to go wherever Richie goes. 

“Sure we won’t be third-wheeling?” Richie asks Ben. 

“No, not at all,” Ben assures him. He throws an anxious glance at Bev, who nods, and says, “You can come with us if you’re going to be normal about it, Richie.” 

“I’m always normal,” Richie says through a mouthful of pizza.

“I might, too,” Eddie interjects, a little loudly. “I really need a break.”

No one points out the wife or job that he’d be abandoning via this break or asks whether or not he needs a break specifically _from_ the wife or job, and he’s grateful for this—but also a little pissy that no one apparently cares about his personal life enough to ask. 

Soon, Mike and Bill invite themselves over, too, and it seems that all the Losers will set out the following morning for New York. It feels better than all going their separate ways again, after they’ve barely got each other back in their lives. They deserve a bit of a grace period, some time to breathe.

That night in Derry, they stay up for a few more hours, raiding the open bar and talking and reminiscing and laughing, and making lots of concussion and amnesia jokes at Richie’s expense. Richie thinks this is a little rude considering they all suffered from long-term supernaturally induced amnesia. When Richie gets up to pour himself another drink from the bottle of Maker’s Mark (in which he’s been putting quite the dent this evening), he stops in his tracks when Eddie wonders—loudly, and directly into Richie’s brain—whether Richie has a drinking problem. 

It’s not a particularly _mean_ thought, nor does it strike Richie as very judgmental. It’s mostly… concern, worry. Richie has never reacted very well to people being concerned about him, though, in that motherly way. He’s _fine_ , and in the case that he’s not fine, at least he knows it. He doesn’t need it pointed out to him. Sure, Richie has teetered on the edge of high-functioning alcoholism for most of his adult life, but that’s not exactly rare. It’s even less rare in his cohort of comedians and performers and writers. At least he doesn’t smoke anymore. 

Despite his cycle of rationalizations and excuses—a familiar routine at this point in his life—Richie still feels chilled and embarrassed and doesn’t pour as much as he was planning to. 

It’s well after midnight and they’re lying on the floor, leaning against furniture, in the deserted Townhouse lobby. 

“I could sleep again,” Eddie says. He’s laying flat across the couch now that everybody else has slid down onto the floor. “Only been awake for… six hours.” 

“Yeah, same here,” Richie says. He tosses back the rest of his drink, and Eddie watches his throat as he swallows, remembering the first night at the Jade, how Richie did shots hands-free. Richie chokes on his drink a little because the thought seems… horny. Foggy, and definitely drunk, but _horny_ ; Eddie shifts in his seat and looks away from Richie’s throat. Richie coughs and wipes his mouth before pulling himself up to his knees. “Going back to sleep.” 

He grapples for his crutches, lying just out of his reach, leaned against the side of the coffee table, and Eddie hops up. “Here, I’m gonna head up, too.”

Eddie pulls Richie to his feet and they make their way up the stairs together. Before they go into their separate rooms, Richie pauses outside his door and says, “Hey, Eddie, I wanted to ask you…”

Eddie stops, turning around in the hallway to stare wide-eyed at him. His mind is mostly blank, nervous, but it briefly flashes to Richie in the deadlights, body suspended ten feet above the cave floor. He forces the image out as quickly as it came. 

“Not ready to go home yet?” Richie asks him, ostensibly casual. He leans forward on his crutches. “What about your… wife?” He says the word with an awkward chuckle and Eddie grimaces. 

But Richie’s directness and Eddie’s drunkenness seem to give Eddie the permission he needs to be honest. “Things haven’t been… good,” he says cautiously. 

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Richie tries to keep his reaction appropriately apologetic, despite the fact that he already knew things were bad, and that he knows things are much worse than Eddie’s willing to say out loud. 

“Yeah, so.” Eddie runs a hand through his hair and sighs. He considers telling Richie that he’s going to leave her, but he stops himself; he should probably tell Myra first. “I think it’ll be good for me to spend some time away.” 

He looks back up at Richie’s face, taking in his features and expression. For a moment, Eddie thinks he wants to kiss Richie, imagines leaning forward and pressing their lips together, and he self-consciously swallows, suddenly more aware of how he feels in his own body. It only last a second or two before Eddie swiftly banishes the thought from his mind, deciding that he’s just drunk and feels weird and lonely and sad.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Eddie says, taking a step back toward his own room. “Goodnight.” 

Richie stands frozen in the hallway for a few seconds, even after Eddie disappears into his room, leaning on his crutches. He’s not sure what just hit him or how to process it. So, he turns and shoulders his door open, and hobbles inside to go to sleep.

* * *

Ben’s place in the Catskills is boxy and modern, all right angles and floor-to-ceiling windows. It feels immediately and refreshingly different from the Derry Townhouse, with its ornate Victorian flair, but the scenery is familiar. They’re a mile up a dirt road from a small town and surrounded by trees just beginning to crisp and turn orange.

It’s nice to still be together. They traveled all day in two cars, Mike’s and Eddie’s. Richie and Bill returned their rentals to the airport in Bangor early that morning; Eddie helped by driving Richie’s rented Mustang since Richie wasn’t confident about operating a vehicle given his ankle situation. The drive was long, eight hours on the road plus a few stops for food. Bev and Ben rode with Mike, and Richie claimed the backseat of Eddie’s sedan—actually, he knows this from reading Eddie’s mind, it’s Myra’s, and she’s super not happy about the fact that he took it, but he crashed his own car which is, by the way, a fuck-off huge Cadillac Escalade—and Bill took shotgun. 

Eddie told Richie that since it was a long drive he should try to keep his injured right foot elevated as much as possible, so Richie threw his compression-wrapped ankle up on the console between the two front seats, and flexed his bare, hairy toes just to get Bill to groan and complain. Each time they stopped at a gas station, Eddie got a fresh Big Gulp full of ice to pour into a ziplock bag—he didn’t want to have to pay thirty cents for just the ice so he always got some candy or sodas or snacks, too—to ice Richie’s ankle. 

When Eddie pressed the cold, condensation-coated ice pack to Richie’s tender, swollen skin, he moaned a little, involuntarily, sucking in a breath through his teeth. It was involuntary the first time, anyway. But Richie noticed how Eddie reacted to the sound—and Eddie noticed his own reaction, too, his skin going warm, muscles tensing. Eddie felt silly for it, felt like he was ten again and embarrassed to death by Richie’s sex jokes that he didn’t understand but would die before asking him to explain. It got worse because, at each pit stop, Richie upped the ante, making sounds as filthy as he thought he could get away with, in Bill’s presence, anyway. 

But he didn’t necessarily have to get away with it for it to work. Their third stop—they were in Connecticut—Richie let out a breathy, “Ah, _fuck_ ,” at the icy-cold relief, and Bill said, “When I agreed to carpool with you guys, I didn’t expect to learn what Richie sounds like in bed, but maybe I should know better by now.” 

Eddie flushed deeper at that and took his hand off the icepack, instead fumbling for the keys and trying to figure out what to do with his face. He felt _so_ stupid for getting flustered by what should be an easy thing to laugh off; Bill could laugh it off, but Eddie always had a hard time laughing off Richie’s antics. Richie felt vindicated by all of this, even if the triumph was sort of nervous and nauseous. Eddie had an undeniable physical reaction to things Richie did, but he wasn’t happy about it and was trying pretty hard to stop those reactions, or explain them away. 

Maybe Richie should stop poking at him, but that’s always what Richie’s done, huh? Pushed and pushed and pushed, not sure what reaction he was even looking for, until all he had accomplished was pushing Eddie away. To Richie, it felt more like picking at his own wounds, like it wasn’t even really about Eddie; it was about proving that he could be alone, projecting that he didn’t really need people, wasn’t afraid to lose them. Richie treated everybody like that when he was younger, and the people he was most afraid to lose got the worst of it. But now he was learning that, to Eddie, on the receiving end, it felt cruelly purposeful and targeted, like a joke Richie played on Eddie, at his expense. At other times, arguably worse, Eddie wondered that it might not be targeted at all; it might just be a random spray of bullets, and Eddie caught most of them simply because of his proximity to Richie. This realization was like a cold shower, suddenly throwing all of Eddie’s previously-incomprehensible preteen angst into sharp relief. 

Still, Richie’s having a hard time deciding how to proceed with the knowledge that Eddie’s just as afraid of losing Richie as Richie is of losing him. 

Eddie eventually replied to Bill’s comment by muttering, “Yeah, well… the Trashmouth,” and then promptly peeled out of the gas station parking lot and got back on the freeway. 

Richie didn’t think much of what Eddie said, but Eddie spent the next three hours periodically agonizing over how stupid it was. Richie spent as much time agonizing over his own stupidity, for making exaggerated sex noises while his childhood crush was icing his ankle. Totally undignified bullshit, and he’s lucky that Eddie’s too caught up in his own anxious shame spirals to notice it. 

Needless to say, it’s a relief when the road trip ends. The six of them invade Ben’s art piece of a home and divvy up the bedrooms and basement futon amongst themselves. Richie ends up in a guest bedroom on one end of the main floor, directly across from the room that Eddie chooses. The house isn’t quite large enough that more distance would soften it, but this means that Richie has a front row seat to Eddie’s Pre-Sleep Anxiety Showcase that night. Richie gets the impression it’s mercifully cut short due to exhaustion from traveling all day but Eddie has time to replay his phone calls and texts with Myra, trying to figure out his next moves and projecting forward her next moves, like a game of relationship chess. On top of that, whenever he lies facing one wall too long he ends up imagining the decaying hand of the leper slipping over his shoulder, like a lover holding him close, so he’ll suddenly whip his head around to make sure that he’s alone in bed after all. 

Despite these real sources of fear, Eddie’s still stupidly hung up on his ‘Trashmouth’ comment from hours ago, feeling obvious and exposed for how he’s been acting around Richie. He reflects on their conversation at the Townhouse just last night, when he told Richie that things between him and his wife were ‘not good.’ That seems to be the breaking point. He tries to clear his head, muttering, _No, no, no, stop it_ , under his breath as he turns onto his side and closes his eyes with fresh determination. 

Richie’s stomach clenches in sympathy because he’s no stranger to insomnia. The Richie Tozier’s Life Regrets Highlight Reel gets at least a few late night screenings per week. But he can’t muster up anything personally painful when his mind is so full of Eddie’s thoughts. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. It’s a relief to know that Eddie isn’t spending his time dwelling on what an idiot asshole Richie is, although Richie wishes he could slip across the hall and into bed with him to help take his mind off his troubles for a while. 

It’s not until Eddie finally falls asleep that Richie does, too.

* * *

There’s not a lot to do at Ben’s place in the Catskills.

They have a long, drawn-out breakfast the first day, refills of coffee carrying them up to lunchtime. Ben suggests a hike, but Richie’s having a hard enough time with flat surfaces. Eddie watches Richie closely through it all, trying to decide the most subtle way to encourage everybody to take a long, strenuous hike so he can have some time alone with an injured Richie. 

“The trails are…” Ben glances at Richie’s crutches and grimaces. “Not that well-groomed. At this time of year. And I haven’t been out here this summer as much as I like to.” 

Mike furrows his brow. “You groom your own trails?” he mutters, and only Bev reacts, snorting. Mike keeps it up, making some kind of Indiana Jones vine-slashing gesture, for Bev’s benefit. 

“Hey, that’s fine,” Richie says, and nods down at his ankle. “This is a great excuse to bail on physical activity.” 

“Nuh-uh,” Eddie interrupts, more petulant than he intended. He immediately regrets his tone. “Your physical therapy.” 

“‘Physical therapy,’” Richie repeats with exaggerated air quotes. He lifts up his foot and stretches it, pointing his toe. He feels his sore tendon tighten and then relax. “There. Done.” 

“Hey, why don’t you guys go on a hike and I’ll stay here and force Richie to actually do his physical therapy,” Eddie says, staring levelly at him.

He’s flighty with eye contact at least half of the time, so Richie gladly stares back, waggling his eyebrows and making a whip-crack sound as he flicks his wrist. 

“You haven’t even started yet,” Eddie accuses, quirking his eyebrows in a clear and—goddamn it—really sexy challenge. 

“Well, excuse me,” Richie says, “but we were sleeping and then we were in the car all day and then we were sleeping again.”

“Better not waste more time, then,” Eddie says. “Unless you want to have a fucked up, weak ankle for the rest of your life. And you’re already forty.” 

Richie scoffs at that, cocking his head—Eddie’s older than Richie by a solid four months and has never let him forget it, so it’s a weird card to play now—and Eddie’s deadpan expression breaks as he laughs and shrugs, backing down. Internally, he’s doused in immediate red-hot embarrassment at having said anything at all, but he doesn’t have many outward tells. 

“Okay,” Bev says flatly. “Weird.” She sighs and pulls herself to her feet. “Have fun with Richie’s fucked up ankle.” 

Things have always been different when they’re alone. 

For one, it’s harder to make eye contact. It’s too intimate, and it only gets worse once Eddie gets close to him. 

Eddie’s the one who actually remembers what the doctor told Richie about his ankle, and Richie never read the pamphlet, which Eddie gets indignant about but– no matter. Eddie’s glad for the excuse to spend time with Richie and he likes feeling needed. There are a whole host of strengthening exercises and stretches, some of which seem definitely made up; Eddie tells Richie to trace the alphabet with his toes so Richie spells out FUCK YOU and Eddie rewards him with a comically unamused expression. When they stand up so Richie can stretch his calf against the wall, Eddie unnecessarily helps maneuver him into position, touching Richie’s waist, and murmuring instructions low under his breath. 

The attention is flattering in a dizzying, slightly creepy way. The only people who have ever been really into Richie were people he was decidedly _not_ into—women, mostly, but a few men, too—so Richie has a hair trigger fight-or-flight instinct toward affection. 

But this is _Eddie_. This is Eddie, and Richie spent his teen years—and the first twenty-four hours back in Derry—trying to figure out how to get him alone, watching his every move, wondering what he was thinking, reading into every word and glance. Now he’s equipped with the knowledge that Eddie returns that impulse just as strongly, and he has no idea what to do with that. 

Ordinarily, Richie finds all of that shit embarrassing, on the giving or receiving end of it. It’s this unbearable vulnerability, the way people trip over themselves, tear themselves open in the hope of catching the tiniest drop of reciprocation, and practically beg to have their hearts broken. It’s an unwelcome reminder that Richie’s more fragile than he’d like to think. 

And, well. In the past day or so, Eddie’s picked up this alarming habit of staring at Richie’s face while Richie is talking and completely tuning out whatever Richie is saying to instead scrutinize each one of his physical characteristics and decide whether or not he finds them attractive. It’s probably flattering because, on the whole, his judgment is: attractive. But the entire exercise has an air of anger and incredulity that makes it difficult for Richie to feel too smug about it. Eddie thinks Richie’s ears are cute and he wants to bite them, but he’s fucking pissed about it, apparently. 

So, yeah, it’s looking pretty likely that Eddie has a crush on Richie.

But what the fuck is Richie supposed to do about that? Eddie’s still married, hasn’t even told his wife that he doesn’t want to be anymore. It also feels like an uncomfortable mismatch. Here’s Richie, who’s made his peace with the fact that he _loves_ Eddie, really loves him, and Eddie’s stuck in the crush stage, which he sublimates into overbearing protectiveness and some aggression, namely calling Richie a dipshit at the drop of a hat. 

Imagine Richie told him how he felt. Right now, if he looked over his shoulder and told Eddie he’s in love with him—even if he downplayed it so as to not scare him off with that level of intensity right out of the gate—what happens next? What, Richie’s going to date Eddie? They’re going to go to dinner and to the fucking movies and talk about their lives? They’re going to date each other like normal people who wouldn’t die for each other? It’s insane. 

Richie’s probably got to wait this one out a little. Let Eddie figure things out on his own. They’ve only been back in each other’s lives for three days. It would be the decent thing to do, to take a step back. Maybe Richie can nudge him along a little, but nothing more than that. 

“Let’s try balancing,” Eddie murmurs, his voice gentle like it never is. He guides Richie away from the wall with a hand on his waist. The touch is completely unnecessary, but so is Eddie helping him at all. “Stand on one foot.” 

Richie pops up his injured foot and grins at Eddie. 

“No, your…” Eddie smiles back at him, dimples deepening. He catalogues his reaction to Richie’s broad smile: handsome. “Your other foot. Dumbass.” 

“The verbal abuse is really conducive to my healing,” Richie says as he switches, putting all his weight on his injured leg. 

He only lasts a couple seconds before he pops his other foot back down, wincing. Eddie grabs his arm. “No? Maybe too soon for that one. Sorry. That’s fine. It’s a nasty sprain, you know.” Eddie guides him back to the couch, Richie limping a little. “I thought it might have been broken. You landed on that foot first, then your head. Fell like a ragdoll.” 

Richie laughs as he settles down, throwing his foot up on the coffee table. “How did, um… Bev said I was in the deadlights? What happened? How did… I come out of it?”

The question triggers a memory, one that instantly fills Eddie with anxiety and shame. It’s Richie, falling to the ground, like a ragdoll, just as Eddie said. His ankle twists and he hits his head on the rocks pretty hard as he falls back. The memory is Eddie’s, playing from his point of view, as he crowds in over Richie, saying his name and patting his chest and cheek. His skin is damp and chilled from the sewer water. 

(Eddie tries to shake the memory from his mind, but it’s no use. His palms are sweating.)

Eddie’s panic rises with each second that Richie lies there, not reacting. His eyes are open but glassy, a pale blue behind his splattered lenses. Then Eddie, remembering the last time, twenty-seven years ago, remembering what Ben did for Beverly—leans down and kisses him. 

Eddie tries really hard not to dwell on the way Richie’s lips felt, the scratch of his stubble against Eddie’s chin, especially now that he’s standing directly in front of Richie, who he knows doesn’t remember this. 

“Um,” Eddie says, scratching his face and looking up at the ceiling, as if trying to recall the details. He has almost no outward tells. Richie’s kind of impressed. “Well, you just… fell to the ground and you were out for a few seconds but then you woke up.” 

“Oh,” Richie says, staring back at him, trying to figure out a subtle way to say, _I don’t mind that you kissed me. In fact, I’m pretty fucking stoked that you kissed me, just wish I remembered it, is all_. He doesn’t come up with anything, so all he says is, “Okay.” 

“Yep.” Eddie pauses for another moment, chewing the inside of his cheek, worrying at the healing scar, and thinking about kissing Richie. He takes a sharp inhale and asks, “Do you want an ice pack?” Without waiting for an answer, he hops up and runs to the kitchen to grab one from the freezer. 

In his absence, Richie wonders if this will be his life forever now. It’s a creative form of torture, knowing all of Eddie’s thoughts and not being able to talk about any of them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for discussion of Stan’s suicide in this chapter.

Bill and Mike only stay for two more days; Mike’s going to drop Bill off at the airport on his way back to Derry, but Bill seems terrified by the prospect of going back home and having to explain his absence. “How much lying do you think is appropriate?” he asks nervously when they’re saying their goodbyes, standing in Ben’s gravel driveway. “Quick survey.”

“Um, well,” Ben starts, appearing to put a lot of thought into it, leaning with one hand on the hood of Mike’s car. “To your boss or to your wife?” 

“What have you told her so far?” Bev asks. 

“Not much!” Bill says, his voice breaking on a strained laugh. 

“Maybe, uh…” Mike’s frown deepens. “There are some things that happened in Derry that can be substantiated. The disappearances. And maybe… Stanley?” 

“So…” Bill crosses his arms, looking at Mike. “I tell her that some kids disappeared in my hometown, which I’ve never before mentioned, and that my childhood friend who I’ve also never mentioned before killed himself so I had to drop everything and go to Maine?”

It’s clear from his tone that he’s not convinced. Mike backs down with a shrug. “Just spitballing.” 

“See, I don’t have this problem,” Richie says with a dark laugh. “I’ve been flaky and impulsive my whole life so everybody would be like, ‘Yeah, sounds about right.’” 

“And you’re…” Eddie starts to say, but he stops. He was going to say ‘And you’re not married,’ but he decided it was unnecessary, not to mention a little mean. (Well, actually, Eddie’s not all that opposed to saying things unnecessary and mean; the real reason he stopped himself was because he’s self-aware enough to know it’s weird to keep pointing out Richie’s single status.)

“Thanks for your input, Richie,” Bill mutters. 

“Another option,” Ben says, holding his hand up to get everyone’s attention, “is that you tell her the truth?” 

In response to everybody’s wordless stares, Bev jumps in to defend him, saying, “That _is_ an option. That you should consider.” 

“At least I have more time to think about it.” Bill stares sullenly out at the woods beyond them for a moment. 

“Good luck, man,” Richie says, stepping in to hug him goodbye. 

Once Mike’s car rolls off down the long, winding driveway and the remaining four of them head back inside, Eddie realizes that he can’t even imagine telling Myra the truth about any of this. Disregarding the supernatural elements, even telling her about his childhood, his hometown, his friends– it’s not a conversation he wants to have. In a sense, it’s a relief. It gives him a good excuse, anyway, to cut things off without remorse. It lets him feel like it’s not his fault, like it’s completely outside of his control. Sometimes marriages fall apart because one half of the couple had their entire childhood erased from their memory and upon recovering it there’s no way things can continue as normal, and that’s no one’s fault.

Richie doesn’t think it’s Eddie’s fault at all, for what it’s worth, and he feels qualified to make a judgment on the matter. He’s noticed a number of red flags, including the real, chilling fear that Eddie feels every time he considers reaching out to Myra, and the over-the-top self-victimizing texts that she’s sent him that Eddie can hardly bring himself to look at. 

But Richie’s glad that Eddie’s at least progressed from the self-hating ‘I’m the common denominator in all my failed relationships’ stage to the ‘it’s no one’s fault, life’s a bitch’ stage. It’s definitely progress.

* * *

With Mike and Bill gone, the Catskills vacation begins to feel like a couples retreat, or maybe more accurately a divorcees’ rehabilitation center. Ben starts going into work that week, to his office in Albany, and he and Bev have moved into different bedrooms now that there’s more space in the house. Eddie’s noticed this change, too, but of course no one has commented on it. The intention is probably to give her some space, which seems healthy, but it leaves Eddie with a misplaced feeling of being judged, as if Ben and Bev taking things slow is their way of signaling to Eddie that he needs to stop fantasizing about Richie before he’s dealt with his own shit.

(But the fantasizing about Richie is one of the only things that calms Eddie down, especially when he’s having trouble falling asleep at night. Richie has never thought of himself as a calming presence, not even _close_ , so he’s having trouble processing the fact that Eddie will purposefully think about him in order to stop himself spiraling into panic. Absurd. Has he _met_ Richie?)

Despite Eddie’s sometimes unbearably romantic thoughts about Richie, he’s continued treating him the same way and Richie can’t decide whether this makes coping with this entire ordeal easier or harder. They fill the hours of the day watching TV or playing cards or chess; Ben has a ridiculously fancy chess set so they’re obligated to play, after trying to remember the rules and then giving up and googling it instead. Bev finds one of Richie’s standup specials on Netflix, and they watch it, and Eddie relentlessly teases Richie about it. Eddie’s teasing crosses the line into actually mean about twenty minutes in, repeating things on-stage Richie says in a mocking voice and calling him a sell-out for working with a writing team. Eddie wills himself to stop but somehow is unable to. 

Richie tries to not let it get to him _too_ much; his standup isn’t, like, high art, but come on, there’s much worse garbage out there. It’s a modest comfort that at least Eddie’s aware that he’s being a dick. Still, when it’s over, Richie gets his revenge by challenging Eddie to a chess match and taking full advantage of his newfound superpower to crush him three times in a row. It’s pretty fun; Eddie gets so pissed off. When Richie finally takes pity on him and lets him win a round, Eddie suspects—correctly—that he let him win which makes Eddie even angrier. 

“Okay, let’s just–” Bev interrupts, calling out from the couch, where she’s been lounging and observing their bullshit for the better part of the day. She makes a gesture, lowering her hand down from above her head to her chest. “Take it down a notch.”

Eddie packs up the chess pieces silently, still fuming, but embarrassed enough now to keep a lid on it. 

When the two of them aren’t actively making each others’ lives a living hell—and Bev’s too, since she’s stuck here with them—they get along pretty well. 

Eddie continues to insert himself into Richie’s recovery, monitoring his behavior and dispensing advice. Richie finds this pretty cute, but Eddie has a complicated reaction to his own protective instincts. He’ll get worried and go on frantic WebMD binges to see how likely it is that Richie will have any lasting issues from his concussion, and then he’ll worry that he’s being overbearing and then he’ll pull back completely, in some self-punishing act that actually ends up punishing Richie. Richie thinks he could never feel smothered by Eddie, barring the fact that Eddie might literally smother him with a pillow in his sleep if he keeps beating him at chess. Richie probably deserves that. 

Anyway, Eddie’s attention never feels like too much to Richie. It always, always feels like not enough, like it leaves a yawning hungry emptiness inside of him, no matter how much he gets, he can never quite fill it up. Maybe that’s a problem with Richie. 

Richie knows he needs to give Eddie some time to grow into this but, honestly, he needs the time, too. He knows what his feelings are, he has no doubts about that, but the thought of this becoming something real, the thought of his relationship with Eddie fundamentally changing… It’s scary. What if it doesn’t work? What if they’re both just coasting on their previous childhood relationship, riding the high of being back in each other’s lives, and once they settle into something more adult, it falls apart? 

The other possible outcome—that it _does_ work, and they spend the rest of their lives together—is no less terrifying. Richie hasn’t even come out yet. Not publicly, not to the Losers. He really needs to do that before he can start considering gay-marrying Eddie. Fuck. He sets a deadline for himself: he’ll come out to his friends by the end of the week. Eddie definitely won’t be bothered by the news. 

Eddie is one-hundred percent under the impression that Richie is straight, by the way. Richie’s thirteen-year-old self is thrilled with this development, but his forty-year-old self can’t help but feel a bit frustrated. How obvious does he have to be? Does he have to hit on Ben in front of everybody again? 

Okay, well, he could solve the problem if he grew a pair and told Eddie. He knows that. It’s just so fucking awkward. What, he’s gonna sit Eddie down on the couch and say the words, “I’m gay,” out loud, devoid of context? No way, he’d rather just get caught in the act of being gay and then not deny the accusation. Richie supposes he could handle it in his usual bullshit way where he casually mentions an ex-boyfriend and acts like the person he’s telling is supposed to already know. A tried and true method. 

He’s a little worried about how Eddie’s going to react. Right now, Richie seems to be a safe and unattainable fantasy for him, and this would certainly make it more real. What if it scares him away? Yet another reason why Richie’s dragging his feet.

* * *

The week goes on and Richie’s ankle begins to feel noticeably better. He stops using the crutches and either walks with the boot brace on or hops around the house, favoring his right foot. As the week goes on, Richie notices another change, too. It takes a couple days for him to be sure but he thinks the telepathy is starting to fade. It’s gradual enough that he didn’t notice at first, and then he thought maybe he had just grown used to it, so Eddie’s voice seemed to take up less space in his head. But by the fourth night, he has to really strain his ears—or, well, the telepathic equivalent of that—to hear Eddie’s thoughts in the guest room across from his, through two closed doors.

He still has no trouble hearing Eddie when they’re in the same room, and if Eddie experiences an intense burst of emotion that comes through clearly, but Richie’s radius is definitely shrinking. 

Richie has a half-baked theory behind all of this, but it sounds like something from a comic book. His theory is that through his brush with the deadlights, some of that omniscient power transferred to him—Bev could see the future, right?—but like radiation, it has a half-life and will slowly drain from him. 

That leaves the question: why can he only read Eddie’s mind? The deadlights want him to get laid or something? 

Ha. Well, maybe it’s darker and more insidious than that. Some kind of monkey’s paw, be-careful-what-you-wish-for thing. He always did want to know what Eddie was thinking. Most of the time it’s good, but…

During physical therapy is the only time Eddie ever touches Richie, and they’re close together, so Eddie’s thoughts are deafeningly loud, to the point where Richie can hardly untangle his own. It’s unbearably intimate, and leaves Richie more tensed up than he should be, since he has not only his own anxiety to contend with but Eddie’s, on top of it: his attraction to Richie and immediate, reflexive self-flagellation about it, creating this spiral of shame. He looks at Richie’s chest or lets his touch linger on his arm and then feels like a pervert for taking advantage of his position, and their time together—he’s supposed to help Richie heal, and he’s getting some sick sexual gratification from it—which in turn makes Richie feel like shit for… existing? Making things hard for Eddie, who seems on a good day unable to decide whether he wants his coffee black or with cream, and therefore is wholly unequipped to decide whether he wants Richie. Right? Eddie seems to think so. Does Richie agree with him? 

Maybe. 

But Eddie vastly prefers his coffee with cream, is the thing. He likes the taste much better, but the taste, his own pleasure, is only one of a myriad factors that goes into making that decision. Eddie’s tried to go light on dairy for years now—health reasons—and there’s always seemed to him something morally upstanding and sturdy about black coffee. Maybe it’s the Puritan lust for suffering that’s never quite faded; you can take the boy out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the boy, after all. Eddie’s always aspired to be a man who takes his coffee black. And sometimes the cream gives him the shits, which is unpleasant but honestly, in Eddie’s opinion—Richie knows this and is oddly charmed by it—not all too bad to have in the morning. Kinda cleans one out. Eddie would choose that over constipation any day. 

Richie knows things about Eddie that he’s sure Eddie would die before admitting and he thinks that all of them make him seem more charming, or at least more real, which was the perspective Richie sorely needed. Knowing all of Eddie’s most unflattering thought processes have not made him less attracted to him, but they have made Eddie… less intimidating, at least. For instance, he knows that when he’s alone, Eddie always sleeps with a pillow lying lengthwise next to him because he likes to spoon it, as if it were a warm body, and he thinks this makes him lonely and pathetic. Richie thinks this is adorable and he would like to be that pillow, thank you very much. Eddie’s fear about the things he does in the privacy of his own bedroom making him abnormal, his feeling of constantly being judged by some all-seeing omnipresent eye—well, that’s all too relatable to Richie. He likes knowing he’s not the only one who feels outside of himself, sometimes, looking at the things he does and thinking: what the fuck, really? 

The other morning, Eddie woke up with a hard-on—he had been having a sex dream but not one that featured another person, or was even necessarily a ‘sex dream’; basically all that was happening in the dream was that he was horny and he was going to masturbate, and he was going into his room and getting lube and everything and he woke up before the good part but after he was painfully turned on, which is frustratingly typical for Eddie’s ‘sex dreams’—and when he woke up, his leg was already slung over the pillow, and the pressure felt so good that he rocked his hips into it a few times before slipping a hand inside his underwear to finish himself off with a couple firm strokes. He felt ridiculous for humping a pillow to take care of his morning wood, coming in his underwear like a teenager, but Richie, needless to say, thought this was so hot that he jerked off to it that morning, and then to the memory of it later that night and again the subsequent morning. 

What were the ethics of jerking off to his one-way telepathic link with Eddie? Probably not great, but it’s not like Eddie wasn’t jerking off thinking about Richie. He’s doing that a lot, in fact, even wishing that Richie would make an appearance in one of his sex dreams. Richie’s right there with him on that one; he’s trying to avoid the temptation of staying up all night just to see if he makes a cameo.

* * *

It’s Thursday morning when Bev walks into the living room, takes one look at Richie and Eddie doing ‘physical therapy’—Richie lying on the floor and Eddie kneeling above him, stretching his legs for him (things have escalated far beyond anything medically necessary at this point)—and turns around to walk right out the front door.

Eddie pretends he didn’t notice anything, but he definitely _did_. He thinks about the kiss in the cavern again, thinks that Bev probably saw that, and therefore can see through all of Eddie’s embarrassingly transparent behavior now. Eddie thinking about the kiss while he’s kneeling over Richie, in basically the same position as when it happened, leaves Richie shivery and breathless. 

But Eddie’s expression is his usual resting bitch face, and he’s not paying much attention to the Richie currently beneath him, to instead reflect back on the semi-conscious glassy-eyed Richie in the cavern, and the way he blinked up at Eddie, staring in abject wonder, after their lips parted. 

Richie feels a little neglected, which he realizes is absurd, but here he is patiently letting Eddie manhandle him to his heart’s content and Eddie’s mind is wandering through regret-tinged memories. 

“Ow,” Richie says, when Eddie stretches his leg too far. “You’re folding me in half.” 

Eddie snaps back to the present moment—and immediately goes warm with embarrassment at their suggestive position. “Sorry,” he mutters, dropping his grip on Richie’s calf as he scoots farther away from him. 

“It’s fine.” Richie props himself up on his elbows to look at him. “I’m gonna come out of this injury more flexible than I was going into it.” 

“Yep,” Eddie says in a tense, cracking voice. He’s thinking about folding Richie in half again. 

(Richie’s really starting to enjoy this. Needs to make the most of it before it all fades away.)

They’re sitting at the kitchen island, having another dose of coffee—Eddie takes his black because he’s indulged himself enough already this morning, but the caffeine only makes him hornier so he’s thinking it was probably a mistake—when Bev comes back about twenty minutes later carrying a bundle of mail under her arm. “Ben’s driveway is like a mile long, I swear,” she says, dropping the stack of envelopes and magazines onto the counter. 

“You could’ve taken my car,” Eddie points out. 

“I needed the walk,” she says, eyebrows raised meaningfully, as she begins to sort through the mail. 

Eddie takes a big gulp of coffee, scorching the roof of his mouth in his eagerness to distract himself from Bev’s judgmental expression. 

“Hey,” Bev says after a moment. Her face is serious now as she holds up a small hand-addressed envelope. Richie steps in closer to take a look; it’s addressed to Ben, and the return label reads _Stanley & Patricia Uris_. 

Richie looks back to Bev, and then to Eddie, who moves around the island to take a look. 

“Oh,” Eddie says when he reads the letter, taking a quick step backward as if burned. 

“Should we open it?” Bev asks, as she begins to slide her finger under the flap to tear it open. 

It’s a handwritten letter, and Bev begins to read it out loud but makes it no more than two sentences in before her soft, shaky voice trails off to nothing. Richie and Eddie stand on either side, reading the letter over her shoulder. 

The three of them, as if competing for gold in the Emotional Repression Olympics, steadfastly refuse to shed a tear in front of each other. When they’ve finished reading the letter, Bev folds it back up—her hands are trembling a little—and returns it to the envelope, setting it down on the counter. Then she leaves the kitchen and disappears down the hallway, toward her bedroom. 

In her absence, Richie and Eddie look at each other for a long moment. Eddie’s mind is… hard to read. It’s a swarm of memories, the time he spent with Stan growing up, quick flashes of his face, overlaid with the words written in the letter, trying to connect the friend he knew with this sad, final expression of who he had become. 

Eddie’s breathing goes a bit shallow and his tear ducts are burning, so he follows Bev’s lead and mumbles something about the bathroom before taking off down the hallway. 

Eddie gets the door shut behind him before he can’t keep it in any longer. He sobs once or twice, and the way his face contorts causes the stitches in his cheek to pull painfully at his skin. The only coherent words going through his head are _It’s not fair_ , which is a thought that seems to rip him freshly open each time, with scalpel precision. 

Sympathetically, Richie’s own eyes begin to well with tears. Overwhelmed by the weight of Eddie’s grief on top of his own, he steps outside to get some space, and stands barefoot on the patio. 

This is a respite; he can still hear Eddie in the back of his mind, but it’s not as overbearing with the additional distance. 

It’s _not_ fair, Richie thinks, staring out at the meadow that is Ben’s backyard, tall grasses and shrubs on the slope of the hill before it turns to forest. None of it was fair, not any of it. It’s not fair that they grew up in Derry out of all the small towns in the world; it’s not fair that they were children at exactly the wrong time and became prey because of it; it’s not fair that Bill’s brother was taken, a random and senseless tragedy that set them down this path; it’s not fair that Stan is dead and it’s not fair that the rest of them are alive. 

That’s Richie’s breaking point; he sits in one of the patio chairs and covers his eyes with his hands, blocking out the morning sun. Stan really thought he wasn’t as brave as the rest of them, that he was going to fuck things up for everyone? It makes Richie angry, honestly, that Stan thought he could make a decision like that, that it wouldn’t impact everyone else around him. He had a wife, and he still chose this, and wrote about his own life like it was meaningless, just a chess piece to take off the board. 

Richie hopes that it wasn’t really the rational process Stan made it out to be, a cost-benefit analysis with his life on the ledger. He doesn’t think he can cope with that. 

But he’ll never really know for sure. All he has is what Stan wanted them to think—and of course he would want them to think it was rational and selfless, the fucking asshole—and his decades-old memories of him, and everything in between is just conjecture. Richie’s sure he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to force this into a satisfying narrative. He’s also sure it’ll never quite fit. 

Richie goes back inside before Eddie leaves the bathroom, which he only does after he’s splashed his face with cold water to try to alleviate the angry-red puffiness around his eyes. Eddie absolutely _hates_ crying, hates everything about it. When he was a kid, he often cried when he got angry, and this led to several humiliating experiences when he tried to stand up for himself against his mother and was unable to get words out at all, the emotion trapping them in his throat. Eddie’s whole life that’s all emotions have really done for him: got in the way, prevented him from doing what he wanted or needed to do. 

Despite the cold water, it’s obvious Eddie had been crying, even if Richie didn’t already know. Eddie makes fleeting eye contact, nodding his head, before he heads off down the hallway, to his own room. 

Richie hoped they would talk, but Eddie’s gone before he has a chance to say anything. He flops down on the couch, not sure what to do with himself other than listen. 

Eddie closes himself into his bedroom and paces the carpeted floor, phone in his hands. The tragedy has given him a rush of clarity; his chest feels like the air after a storm clears, empty, cooler and dry, the pressure dropping. Before he loses the feeling, he calls the divorce lawyer he chose after a late night research binge earlier that week. 

He’s on the phone for a while. Richie tries not to listen. When he finally gets off the phone and leaves his bedroom to wander into the living room, he looks at Richie and cautiously asks him if he wants to play chess. 

It’s definitely an olive branch; Eddie hates playing (losing) chess against Richie. But he wants to spend time with Richie, and a structured game is less emotionally demanding than a real conversation about what just happened, and easier to explain than doing what he really wants to do which is to lay down on the couch and rest his head on Richie’s lap. 

So, they play chess. 

Ordinarily, Richie would be relieved that Eddie doesn’t want to talk about emotional things. Richie’s a person who’s not confident in his own ability to be close to people, to provide comfort, and he’s also uncomfortable with anything less than total equality in a relationship, so the way that he copes with this is, basically, by never opening up or asking for help. If he doesn’t put that upon other people then he can’t feel too guilty about not giving much to them, right? It’s worked for most of his life. 

But now with Eddie everything’s gone haywire. He wants to be able to provide something for Eddie. It doesn’t scare him so much, not when it’s Eddie. 

Richie’s mother once told him that he’s selfish. He’s spent a lot of time over the years mulling over that, even milking it for some cheap laughs once or twice on stage. Richie was seventeen at the time and she said it because he kept forgetting to help clean up around the house. At the time, Richie thought it was an overreaction. He forgot because he had so many other things on his mind; if she wanted help she should’ve just asked him. Now that Richie’s older he can appreciate that forgetfulness isn’t value-neutral and he shouldn’t always put people in the position of having to ask when they need something from him, over and over again. That’s why people stop expecting anything from him at all. 

Of course, just about every girlfriend or boyfriend he’s ever had at some point accused Richie or being emotionally withholding or distant or ‘bad with feelings’ or just an asshole, which was shorthand for all of the above. In Richie’s opinion, he wasn’t _withholding_ anything. It’s not like he had so much love to give and he chose not to give it. He really didn’t feel like he was capable of what they wanted from him. 

Eddie makes him feel like he could be capable of it. Like he has something to give, like he might not be selfish for once in his life. 

Eddie wants Richie to comfort him, too, he just doesn’t know how to ask for it. And Richie’s not quite sure how to offer it. So for today, Richie will go a bit easy on him in this chess match—but still beat him in the end, of course. Eddie’s too fragile for the humiliation of Richie letting him win.

* * *

When Ben comes home from work that evening, Bev shows him the letter. Ben, perhaps more in-touch with his softer emotions than the three of them, starts crying almost immediately.

“Oh, honey,” Bev says, holding his arms and popping up on her tip-toes so she can overcome her small size to give him a more comforting hug. 

They’re standing around the kitchen again, Richie and Eddie awkwardly lingering, while Ben curls against Bev’s shoulder, crying. She rubs his back. “I know I wasn’t as close to him as you guys were,” Ben says, directing this to Richie and Eddie. “But it feels like… This makes it feel real, I think. That he thought about us, too.” 

“Yeah, it–” Richie begins to say, reaching out to pat Ben’s shoulder, but Eddie interrupts, blurting, “I’m getting divorced.” 

He no sooner gets the words out than he buries his face in his hands, shoulders shaking with sobs he tries desperately to suppress. 

“Oh, Eds,” Bev says, looking over Ben to shoot a worried glance at Richie.

Eddie is so tense and embarrassed, apologizing for his outburst even as Richie slowly moves toward him to wrap him in his arms. “It’s okay,” Richie mutters, trying to hold him, but Eddie’s not really submitting to it, still covering his own face with his hands.

“I’m sorry, fuck,” Eddie manages, voice raw and wet. His mind is basically clanging alarms at this point, alerting him to the ongoing crisis that is him involuntarily showing emotions, which only adds panic to the mix. 

“I’m proud of you,” Richie says, and Eddie sobs into his hands. “It’s a big step. You’re really brave.”

“No,” Eddie says, rejecting the comfort on pure instinct, but he relaxes by a degree, leaning his head against Richie’s chest. He’s still ramrod straight, sort of comically stiff as Richie wraps his arms tighter around his waist. He remembers Richie saying he was brave before, in Derry, and he feels like this, too, is somehow a joke that Richie plays on him. 

“Why would I lie to you?” Richie asks him, rocking him back and forth a bit in an attempt to loosen him up. It works; Eddie scoffs, almost a laugh. 

“You lie to me all the time,” Eddie mumbles, but he’s smiling a little. He’s thinking back on all the times in their childhood that Richie would pretend to hold strong, unshakable and blatantly false beliefs—just to rile Eddie up. Eddie always fell for it, too, even though he knew it was a joke. It was just too frustrating; how was he supposed to ignore Richie when he insisted that there was a comic book in which Spider-Man could jizz spiderwebs?

Richie forgot about that one; he tries not to laugh, chewing at the inside of his cheek as a smile stretches across his face. “I’ve never lied to you about anything important,” Richie says, and it’s true. 

Mostly true. If he doesn’t count lies by omission. Richie’s stomach turns in shame and apprehension as he remembers the ultimatum he gave himself earlier this week. He’s running up to that deadline fast. But now is not the moment. Now is never the moment. 

Eddie smiles, sad and private in the space between his own hands and Richie’s chest, where he thinks no one can see. Finally he relaxes enough to lose the defensive posture, dropping his hands from his face. His chin is level with Richie’s shoulder when he’s standing at full height but he slouches so he can press his cheek against Richie’s chest. 

They stand like that for another few minutes, quietly, Eddie not crying anymore. Eddie pays attention to how his body reacts, something he has to make a conscious effort to do, after spending so much of his life ignoring and suppressing anything physical, after a childhood being told he felt sick and weak when he didn’t. Eddie’s been so obsessed with feeling bad, fixating on every minor ache and pain, that he forgot how to recognize when he feels good. 

This feels good, he thinks. Not even in a sexual way. Just feeling Richie’s warmth and hearing his heartbeat. His own pulse seems to slow to match his, and Eddie mimics the rhythm of Richie’s breath so their chests expand in sync. 

When Eddie does pull away, reluctantly, it’s with an awkward chuckle and another apology. 

“Don’t apologize,” Richie tells him, with an easy smile. “You can cry on my shoulder any time you want.”

That might have pushed it too far; Eddie reflexively interprets the comment as Richie making fun of him, before he takes in Richie’s sincere expression and cautiously allows himself to think it was genuine. “Thanks, Richie,” he says, and he absently tongues at the raised scar on the inside of his cheek.

Richie is suddenly overcome with the urge to feel Eddie’s scar with his own tongue. And, damn, okay, Eddie’s not the only one with insane and probably maladjusted horny thoughts. The two of them are going to destroy each other.

* * *

If Richie’s good at anything, it’s procrastination. He pulled some impressive feats in college, completed term papers in the twenty-four hours before they were due, pulling all nighters and consuming so much caffeine he could no longer see straight. The habit continued into his career, and all other aspects of his life, and even after all these years, Richie’s never been properly punished for it. He’s always managed to complete the things he needed to on time, so each time he lived a little bit closer to the edge, pushing his luck.

He takes a similar approach to coming out to his friends. 

He doesn’t do it until just before midnight on Friday night, which seems like the firm deadline for ‘the end of the week.’ They’re sitting around the fire on Ben’s patio, and there’s a distinct double-date vibe to the scene, two couples sharing loveseats across a pit of smoldering embers. His knee brushes against Eddie’s and Eddie is just as unbearably aware of the physical contact as Richie is. 

Luckily, he does get a natural opening in the conversation. They’ve been comparing notes for an hour or so, who has lived in which cities at what times, the near-misses and occasions they might’ve crossed paths, and all the connections they didn’t know about, tying them together over the years. Bev for a time worked as a stylist for an actress who Richie was friends with. ‘Was,’ past tense, because, as he explains: 

“Yeah, she was really good friends with my, um.” Richie pauses, scratching his face and staring at the fire. The creases of his jeans around his knees are hot. Now or never. “My boyfriend, at the time,” he finishes, keeping his eyes fixed on the flames for a long beat.

When he’s feeling brave enough to glance up, he immediately meets Ben’s watery eyes. 

Richie’s prickly and defensive at the moment, so he snaps at him. “No, don’t you dare cry, Ben. What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re like a fucking teddy bear.” 

“Sorry,” Ben says, laughing good-naturedly and wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. “I’m proud of you.” 

“Nope,” Richie says, shaking his head. He leans back in his seat, crossing his arms. His thigh brushes against Eddie’s, who’s rapidly processing this new information internally but at a total loss of a normal way to react. 

Eddie’s quickly getting horny about the news, which is a totally inappropriate reaction to Richie opening up and being vulnerable (not that Richie minds)—and, god, the idea of Richie open and vulnerable is _also_ a very horny thought for Eddie. He tugs at his collar, feeling unbearably warm, and it’s only partially because of the fire. 

“Nope?” Bev repeats, grinning. “Richie. Come on. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

She hops up from her seat and Richie rolls his eyes but he’s powerless to stop her. She leans down to give him a hug, patting his back. The gesture does hit Richie harder than he bargained for, and, humiliatingly, he’s a little choked up by the time she pulls back and returns to her seat. Luckily, no one comments on it when Richie sniffs harshly and rubs at his runny nose. 

Meanwhile, Eddie’s spiraling into crisis mode fast, staring at the fire, and berating himself for being an awful friend who’s making Richie’s coming out all about himself. For all he knows, Richie might be seeing someone, and even if he isn’t, there’s no guarantee he’d ever be attracted to Eddie, and—Eddie feels like a piece of shit. 

He turns to glance at Richie, only holding eye contact for a brief moment, as he says, “I’m glad you told us.” 

Satisfied that he has at least fulfilled the most basic responsibilities of friendship, Eddie goes silent again, turning to stare at the fire again and wallow in his thoughts. 

“Do you– If you don’t mind me asking,” Bev says, back in her seat now, sitting with her feet up and leaning against Ben’s shoulder. “Do you think you’ll come out publicly?” 

Richie winces at the question, and Bev immediately assures him he doesn’t have to talk about it if he doesn’t want to. “No, it’s fine,” he says, cutting her off. “I’m just not sure what to do. It feels… too late? I know that’s stupid, but… I don’t really have a reason to come out, either. I’m not in a relationship or anything.” (He’s proud of himself for finding a natural way to work that in; Eddie’s pulse jumps at the news, but he immediately scolds himself for being happy about it.) “I might take a break from standup for a while. Get out of the spotlight for a while, then… If I go back to it, just be out and pretend I always have been? That would be ideal. Think I could trick everyone?” 

Bev chuckles softly. “As much as you live for attention, you actually hate attention.” 

Richie barks a laugh, feeling exposed and seen, but not in a totally bad way. It feels like controlled danger, like a trust fall. “Yeah, you know what, yeah,” he says, still laughing. “I have a complicated relationship with attention.” 

“It’s because you’re an only child,” Bev says, but she’s grinning, not totally serious in the diagnosis. 

“We are all only children,” Richie tells her, smiling back. “Except Bill, but, y’know. Honorary only child.” 

“Richie,” Ben scolds, even as he laughs a little. 

“I wonder if that’s…” Eddie says, suddenly more alert, as he leans forward. “If that’s part of it. That we were all alone.”

“I think so,” Ben says quietly. “I thought about it. Even before we almost died together. It felt sort of poetic, that we all found each other.”

Richie’s first instinct is to mercilessly tease Ben for saying that anything ‘felt poetic’ at age thirteen, but he bites it back. He’s working on having less aggressive reactions to sincerity—being around Ben is a fucking trial, but consider it exposure therapy—and besides, Ben isn’t wrong. It did feel like Richie found a family that summer; it still does. 

Richie probably only gets annoyed with earnestness because it seems so easy for other people to just say what they mean, without hiding it under layers of irony and plausible deniability and self-deprecation. Maybe he can learn how to do that, too, sometimes, if he works on it.

* * *

They go inside and to bed once the fire has burned down to nothing but ash and faintly glowing embers.

Eddie says goodnight to Richie in the hallway and he wants to hug Richie but he’s not going to do it. So, Richie steps in and hugs him. Eddie’s chin tucks over his shoulder and he clutches Richie’s back too hard, like he can’t remember the appropriate amount of pressure to apply in a hug. Eddie’s the one to pull away first, and he ducks into his bedroom with another murmured, “Goodnight.” 

Eddie does not fall asleep for a while. 

Richie lies awake in bed, and he doesn’t have any trouble hearing Eddie tonight, the intensity of emotion practically piercing Richie’s skull. 

Eddie’s never quite felt this way about someone, this intense obsessive deeply physical attraction. Except, well… He had a roommate for a year, in college, named Adam, who was tall and dark-haired. (From the blurry memories in Eddie’s head—it’s been two decades since he’s seen him—Richie can tell that he shares a resemblance with Adam but it’s not quite strong enough to alleviate the immediate misguided jealousy that Richie feels toward this forever-twenty-year-old in Eddie’s head, who he will never see again.) The two of them had an intense and codependent friendship, the basic shape of which is also recognizable to Richie, and it ended in disaster. Eddie now recognizes that as his first real heartbreak. Nothing even happened between them. They never dated or slept together or even kissed. And something still hurts in his chest just thinking about it.

So, Eddie was in love with Adam. And, by that logic, he must be currently in love with Richie, because whatever he felt for Adam at the time doesn’t hold a candle to this. 

Eddie doesn’t know how it was possible he got this far in life without really understanding or accepting the physical component of love. Maybe he thought he was a more highly evolved man, with enough discipline to choose who he was attracted to, and who he fell in love with. Turns out he’s just gay. Fucking figures. 

Richie listens to all of this, wide awake and trembling a little in his own bed, because Eddie’s really getting there. He’s working through things and, amazingly, has arrived at the conclusion that Richie would have never dared to even hope for. 

And Richie… He thinks he’s getting there, too. It’s terrifying but he thinks he’s getting there.


	3. Chapter 3

Richie wakes up when Eddie wakes up. It takes him a few seconds to orient himself. It’s still dark outside. He’s probably only been asleep for a few hours. The house is quiet. 

Eddie’s also orienting himself, his heart rate beginning to level as he lays in bed, just across the hall. He had a nightmare and the intensity of his fear as he gasped awake cut through Richie’s sleep and the fog that has been descending over Eddie’s thoughts of late. It came through loud and clear, and now Richie’s as alert as he is, heart pounding. He listens as Eddie calms himself, knows that he’d been crying through the dream, can feel the drying tears on his face like it’s his own. Eddie wants to check on Richie, just see him sleeping in his room, to make sure he’s okay. But he also thinks that that’s ridiculous and needy and creepy. 

_I wish you would, Eds_ , Richie thinks, trying to project his thoughts. Maybe he can turn this into a two-way street by force of will alone. 

As a compromise to himself—Eddie’s always making these little deals with himself, and he’s a tough negotiator—Eddie decides to get out of bed and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the way there, he’ll press an ear to Richie’s door to listen for a reassuring sign of life. 

When Eddie gets up and goes toward his door, Richie doesn’t even think. He scrambles out of bed and goes to his own door, flinging it open at the same time Eddie does. Their doors are just across the hall from each other, so they come face to face. Eddie jumps back in surprise, yelping, his hand flying to his mouth to try to stifle the noise too late.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Eddie says, placing a hand dramatically over his chest. “Startled me.” 

“Sorry,” Richie says, holding his hands up. “Sorry, I just… couldn’t sleep.”

Eddie, recovered from the shock, looks back at him warily. “Me either.” 

“Bad dream,” Richie says. 

“Me too,” Eddie says, still hesitant. He’s searching Richie’s face, shadowed in the dark hallway, looking for some sign that Richie wants him, feels the same way. He’s close to saying something, wants to ask Richie about his dream, wants to ask Richie to come to bed with him, wants to curl up in his arms. 

Richie takes the leap for him. He says, “Do you want to come in?” and gestures back toward his bed. 

Eddie nods warily. “Yeah, okay.”

They take a few steps inside. Richie can feel how fast Eddie’s heart is beating, and it’s not from fear anymore. “To be clear,” Richie says, “I want to cuddle you. In bed.”

Eddie scoffs a little. He crawls into bed on his knees. “Yeah, I’ll rock you back to sleep. Whatever you need, dude.”

Eddie’s thoughts have turned distinctly cruel at this point. ( _Pathetic. Desperate. You can’t even be a good friend to him._ ) 

Richie tries to think of the right thing to say, as he always does, to coax Eddie out of his self-loathing spiral. This time he might have an idea. He thinks they’ve had enough time at this point, that they’re both ready for this. He lumbers back into bed, not so graceful with his sore ankle, and without hesitation, he gathers Eddie into his arms. 

It’s been a while since Richie has truly cuddled someone and he’s surprised by how well they fit together. Eddie’s warm, a total furnace, one of his legs burning hot between Richie’s. Eddie is surprised by how comfortable it is, too, and it’s been at least as long since he’s been held like this. 

“I wasn’t kidding,” Richie says, his voice low. 

Eddie hums, and his mind is oddly, frustratingly blank now. He’s tense, holding his muscles still, not allowing himself to fully relax against Richie’s body. “What did you dream about?” he asks him, voice barely a whisper. 

“My, uh… you know. The deadlights,” Richie lies. It’s not a complete fabrication, though. He’s had the dreams before, but they’re not really nightmares, not in the way Eddie has them, the pain and terror of reliving events, re-enacting them, taking components and blending them together into fresh horrors. Who needs a Lovecraftian fear demon, huh? Eddie’s got that shit covered on his own. Richie’s dreams are duller, for which he’s lucky and grateful. “What did you dream about?”

Eddie sighs, briefly considering backing out of it or saying he can’t remember. “You,” he says quietly. 

“Shit, sounds scary,” Richie jokes, and it gets a short laugh, huffed against Richie’s neck. 

“Dumbass,” Eddie says and nestles a bit closer to him. “It was that you… didn’t make it out.”

“Just a dream,” Richie tells him, rubbing his hand over his back. “We made it out. I’m right here.”

“I know,” Eddie says, not indignant as he usually would be about Richie telling him things he already knows. He’s comforted by it now, or maybe too fixated on the hand on his back to pay any mind to Richie’s words. 

“You don’t usually touch me,” Richie says then, his tone casual, but he feels the way that Eddie tenses up again, how his thoughts spin out into nervous static. “Except when you’re helping with PT. This is nice.” Richie turns his head to brush his lips against Eddie’s forehead. 

If he’s dragging it out purposefully at this point, he can be forgiven. It feels good to slowly peel away Eddie’s layers of doubt, to listen to him as his mind races, trying to decide if there’s any possible platonic interpretation of a forehead kiss while cuddled in bed. Eddie’s a talented mental gymnast, though, Richie knows that much. Eddie remembers when Richie used to pinch his cheeks when they were kids, call him cute, once or twice even sank to his knees and dramatically kissed Eddie’s hand, grabbing tight on his wrist while Eddie tried to pull himself free, squawking at Richie to stop, cut it out. Richie only ever got to act that way because of Eddie’s performative resistance; if Eddie hadn’t so dramatically shoved him away, Richie wouldn’t have been able to pull him close in the first place. Richie gets a flush of embarrassment from experiencing these memories, but he also can’t help but notice that Eddie doesn’t think that Richie’s behavior reflected poorly on him. Eddie only feels embarrassed about his own reaction at the time, and how vividly he remembers every time Richie ever touched him. 

Well, he’s not alone in that. 

Richie runs his hand down Eddie’s back, until his fingers hook under the hem of his shirt, pressing up lightly over the bare, peach-fuzzed skin on the small of his back. He turns his head to nuzzle at Eddie’s forehead again, kissing against his hairline and temple. 

Eddie’s starting to get turned on; he’s aware of it, and a bit mortified, as his blood seems to race faster in his veins. “Richie,” he breathes, not daring to move. “What are you doing?”

“I want to kiss you,” Richie says, and pulls away from him just enough to look down into his eyes. Eddie is wide-eyed and unblinking beneath him, mouth slightly open, and he’s self-conscious that his mouth tastes stale from the few hours of sleep, but mostly he wants to kiss Richie so badly that he forgets to breathe for a few seconds. 

At the same instant that Eddie decides to surge up to kiss him, Richie leans down to close the gap, so they collide with two-sided momentum into a hard press. It’s dizzying as Richie tries to read Eddie’s reaction—but he shuts that down, and just feels Eddie’s mouth on his and focuses on his own feelings. 

Eddie grips Richie’s shoulders hard enough to hurt and doesn’t want to pull back even to breathe, so he breathes in huffs through his nose, hot against Richie’s face. 

“What does,” Eddie mumbles between kisses, not able to decide between kissing Richie and trying to speak. “What does this mean to you?”

“Everything,” Richie says easily. “I love you, I’m attracted to you, I want to be with you.”

“I love you,” Eddie returns, breathless. “Really, I love you, it was making me crazy, I’ve never felt so– that’s why I wouldn’t touch you, I–” 

“I know,” Richie says, laughing a little, incredulous. He _knows_ , but hearing it out loud is so different; it’s real and physical, vibrations from Eddie’s throat that collide with Richie’s ear drums. The confession is not immediately followed by a cold shower of shame, the way so many of Eddie’s thoughts are. “Eds, I know, it’s okay.”

“You haven’t called me ‘Eds’ since we were kids,” Eddie says and kisses, open-mouthed and unfocused, along Richie’s chin and jaw. 

“I thought you hated that.” Richie wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist as he begins to shift on top of him. 

“I do hate it,” Eddie tells him, but he really, really doesn’t. Richie doesn’t have to be a mindreader to know that.

The soft, thin material of their pajamas doesn’t leave much to the imagination when Eddie settles his weight across Richie’s hips, still mouthing at Richie’s face and neck. Richie is already completely hard—it doesn’t help that Eddie’s arousal lights up his brain like it’s his own, so he’s getting twice of everything—and Eddie notices as soon as he bumps against it. The firm bulge nudges up just behind his balls and, while Eddie finally gets his wish and nips at Richie’s earlobe, he grinds down in his lap. 

“God, fuck,” Richie gasps, his hands flying up to grip Eddie’s thighs. It’s disorienting, the way he can feel his own fingertips pressing into Eddie’s skin, too tight, but Eddie likes it, so Richie squeezes harder. 

“Richie,” Eddie breathes, close to his ear. “I want to…”

He _wants_ to suck his dick, but he’s not going to say it out loud. Richie nods as Eddie begins to move back, straddling his thighs. “Yeah, please, anything.”

By all accounts perhaps Richie should be the one running the show—not only is he the only one between them with previous experience with men, but he’s also armed with the secret weapon of knowing _exactly_ what Eddie wants, and it would be a waste to not take full advantage—but at the moment, he feels almost paralyzed with how much he wants Eddie, and how much Eddie wants him. It’s a feedback loop inside his own head, buzzing out into static. 

After tugging down his sweatpants and boxers, Eddie takes him into his mouth and Richie knows it’s over for him. This is it for him. He’s had a good run, but if Eddie for some reason decides that he doesn’t want to be with him after all, he’ll have to change his name, sell all his belongings and move to the woods to live out the rest of his days as a hermit. Maybe he can live here with Ben, actually; he’d be a good roommate. It would be a lonely life but not too bad. At least he’ll have experienced this once. 

While Eddie holds him around the root and tongues at the head, his thoughts are basically unfiltered but weirdly earnest dirty talk, as he rationally assesses how he feels with a cock in his mouth and decides he _likes_ it, especially likes that it’s Richie’s cock, but will need some more practice to get rid of that gag reflex. _Doesn’t even taste bad_ , Eddie thinks, with disconcerting clarity, and Richie laughs a little, totally wrecked. 

Eddie glances up at the sound, suddenly remembering that he should be gauging Richie’s reaction or otherwise paying attention to him, and not treating his dick as a disembodied entity, and therefore catches Richie in intense eye contact. Eddie’s eyes are wide and flashing in the dark room, attentively focused on Richie. He wants Richie to touch him, so Richie does, running fingers through his hair and thumbing at the corner of his mouth. 

“Feels so good,” Richie tells him, and the straightforward praise goes right to Eddie’s dick, in a rush of arousal that Richie can feel as acutely as his own. Eddie briefly pulls off to catch his breath and instead nuzzle at the base of Richie’s cock and down to his balls, in a move that doesn’t feel as precisely sexual as it does affectionate. 

Richie’s sure he will never experience sex quite like this ever again, and it’s as good as it is totally overwhelming. He can feel his own cock in Eddie’s mouth, through the filter of Eddie’s sensations and thoughts: the hot thick weight of it, the way it nudges against his soft palate. Richie _likes_ sucking cock—a lot—so this adds to the experience: the feeling of fullness, warmth, the focus. 

When Eddie’s jaw starts to ache and he pulls off to use his hand instead, Richie takes the opportunity to shift their positions. He was in danger of coming all too soon, anyway. Eddie goes still and pliant as Richie flips them, pushing Eddie down onto his back on the mattress. Richie frees his own legs of his pants and strips off his t-shirt while Eddie does the same, the flurry of motion as they undress causing the bed frame to creak. 

Richie already knew basically what Eddie looks like naked. He couldn’t have exactly avoided a trip into Eddie’s mind when he was in the shower, even if he wasn’t actively trying to invade his privacy. But that was always a cold and objective view of Eddie’s body, if not a critical one. For instance, Eddie has no love lost for the patchy chest hair that is thickest around his nipples—so that’s where Richie starts, bringing his mouth first to his collarbone and kissing his way down. At the same time, he wraps one hand around Eddie’s cock, immediately adjusting his grip based on Eddie’s not-quite-conscious reactions; it’s as intuitive as masturbating, instinctively feeling out what Eddie wants and doing it, and within minutes Eddie is panting, hands roaming and scratching over Richie’s back, thighs spread on either side of Richie’s hips, twitching and tightening. 

Eddie knows he’s close, so Richie knows it before Eddie even attempts to gasp it out. Richie cuts him off by trailing down his chest and stomach, shifting farther down on the bed, until he’s licking up the length of Eddie’s cock. 

It gets a little clumsy and desperate at that point, Eddie’s legs thrown over Richie’s shoulders, and Richie breathing hard as he licks and sucks. He can’t differentiate between Eddie’s climbing arousal and his own, but either way he _needs_ to touch himself, so he fists one hand around his own cock, nearly sobbing with relief when he does. 

“Holy fucking _shit_ ,” Eddie hisses, his hips jerking up. The hand that’s not currently got a death grip in Richie’s hair flails a bit, grabbing at the sheets. Richie catches it with his free hand, squeezing and pinning his wrist to the mattress. Eddie’s right on the edge, and he comes seconds later, down Richie’s throat. Eddie’s orgasm hits Richie like a fucking train, shocking him into his own before he even knew he was close. He lets Eddie’s cock slip from his mouth as he gasps, overcome, and drops his forehead against Eddie’s hip to ride it out as he pulses into his own fist. 

Eddie’s fingers are still in his hair, but the grip slowly relaxes as his energy drains. “Did you…?” ( _Come? Finish?_ Eddie feels self-conscious about his own word choice so he trails off.) 

Richie lifts up and crawls over him to lazily kiss him, which is answer enough. They make out slowly for a while, bodies pressed together, the wet mound of Eddie’s softening cock pressed against Richie’s abdomen. Richie’s crushing him a little with his weight, but Eddie doesn’t mind, arms wrapped around his back to hold him in place. 

When Richie gets too tired to hold his own body up, he rolls onto his side, still kissing at Eddie’s shoulder and neck.

“Not thinking about the bad dream anymore, are you?” Richie whispers, smiling against the skin of his shoulder.

Eddie smiles too, huffing a laugh. “Well, now I am.” 

“Shit, sorry,” Richie says, and he trails a hand down over Eddie’s body, eventually cupping it a bit possessively over Eddie’s dick. Richie’s fingers are still coated in his own come, which he clocks at the exact same moment that Eddie realizes it, his pulse jumping. 

The sensation prompts an idea, an image that pops unbidden into Eddie’s mind, and instantly makes him flush hot. 

Richie really loves Eddie’s mind. He has the _best_ ideas. 

“This okay?” Richie asks as he runs a slick finger down between Eddie’s legs and over his taint, but he already knows the answer. “C’mere,” Richie mumbles and pulls Eddie toward him until he’s lying with his back to Richie’s chest, on top of him, legs spread on either side of Richie’s hips. 

Eddie goes easily, his head dropping back on Richie’s shoulder, letting his loose body melt against him. _God, his fucking hands_ , Eddie thinks, the first really coherent thought he’s had in a while. Richie brings his left hand up to press fingertips to Eddie’s lips, who eagerly opens, sucking two of them in up to the knuckle. 

Eddie’s internal monologue isn’t so verbose at this point, but Richie can still tell what he wants and needs, and everything feels doubled, as he feels an echo of what Eddie feels, with every move. He breaches Eddie with one finger and when Eddie shudders and tries to say, “A little…” around Richie’s fingers in his mouth, Richie knows what he needs before he finishes the sentence. He crooks his finger and feels the spot that he brushes inside Eddie, knows that it’s what he wants before he gasps, “Yeah, right there.” 

Richie didn’t start this with the purpose of making Eddie come again, just some post-coital greedy touching, but Eddie’s starting to perk up now, blood rushing quicker through his veins, and he thinks that maybe he is up for another round, so he lets Richie keep going and Richie is more than happy to keep going. 

He adds a second finger when Eddie thinks he’s ready for it and finds the pace that he wants; soon he brings his other, saliva-wet hand to Eddie’s cock, getting hard again, to sync the strokes of his hand with the thrust in and out of his fingers. It’s a meditative kind of concentration, an instinctive matching of desire to action; Richie feels like he could do this forever. 

And he’s getting hard again, too, pressing into the small of Eddie’s back; Eddie’s pretty fixated on Richie’s dick and where it is and where it might go next. 

“I’m not–” Eddie starts. “I don’t think I can–” 

The telepathic translation is that Eddie doesn’t think he can handle getting fucked right now, much as he might want to.

“Can I rub it on you?” Richie asks, as a compromise, and Eddie reacts like this is the most brazenly sexy request he’s heard in his life—it might be, unfortunately—nodding as he says, “Yes, yes, please.” 

Richie rolls them onto their sides, pressing against Eddie’s back. He spreads Eddie’s cheeks and there’s enough slickness from pre-come and spit and sweat to glide smoothly against his skin. Eddie doesn’t even know what to do with his hands, totally enveloped by Richie at his back, and his big hand around his cock, stroking him exactly the way he wants it; Richie alternates between two fingers inside him, pressing exactly, maddeningly, where he needs it, and the blunt head of his cock rubbing against his hole, applying just enough pressure to get his heart hammering in his chest. Eddie reaches behind and fists a hand in Richie’s hair for lack of anything else to ground him. 

Eddie’s on the edge for much longer the second time, like an extended free fall, feeling like he’s close to bursting. But still, soon enough, with Richie’s fingers inside him, he comes, muscles tensing as he spills into Richie’s hand. 

Richie feels it vicariously for the second time and that, combined with the way that Eddie thrashes slightly, totally overwhelmed but contained in Richie’s arms, is so devastatingly sexy that Richie has to pinch his eyes shut for a second so he doesn’t lose it. 

But he loses it shortly after because Eddie’s brain-to-mouth filter is nonexistent enough that when he says, “Want you to come on me,” Richie doesn’t even have the telepathic forewarning to prepare himself. 

“Yeah, fuck, gonna come,” Richie says, already so hot with how close he is, and he grips Eddie’s hip hard with one hand while he jerks himself with the other, the head of his cock pressed against the cleft of Eddie’s ass. “You’re gonna make me come again, you’re so fucking hot.”

Eddie groans quietly, arching his back to press his ass against Richie; he reaches behind to clutch at Richie’s thigh, and he imagines Richie fucking him like this, quick and hard to get himself off after making Eddie come. 

And that does it; Richie bites down on Eddie’s shoulder as he comes, his eyelids flashing white with the intensity of it. Even through the skull-piercing moment of climax, he feels the vicarious sting of pain on Eddie’s skin so he soothes the angry red spot with his tongue while he comes down. Eddie rubs his thigh through it, fingers ruffling the coarse hair. 

“What the _fuck_ ,” Eddie says plaintively, after a long beat of silence. Their breathing slows. He sounds exhausted and a little annoyed. “Why was that so good?”

“You sound mad.” Richie smirks, more self-satisfied than he’s been in his life. It’s going to take a while for his ego to deflate. He feels like the fucking _man_.

Eddie wonders whether it’s because it’s his first time having sex with someone he really loves and is actually attracted to, but the thought depresses him so he tries not to dwell on it. Richie doesn’t quite have the heart to confess that he cheated a little. So what? Eddie deserves to have his mind blown. He deserves sex so good that in its wake he’s left feeling melancholy and contemplating whether he could’ve had this his whole life. A double-edged sword, maybe, but a hell of a lot better than never knowing. 

Richie attempts to gather him up in his arms, wanting to cuddle even though they’re sweaty and sticky, but Eddie fights back, rolling them the opposite way as he grumbles, “No, I wanna spoon _you_ , you fucking asshole, fucking…” 

Eddie thinks the words ‘sex god’ but he does not say them. Good instincts; he never would’ve lived that down. Regardless, Richie breaks into giggles, his shoulders shaking. 

“It was good for me, too, thanks for asking.”

Eddie grumbles, under his breath, but Richie can still make it out thanks to the telepathy situation, “Well, great, glad you were happy with my first attempt at a blowjob, you motherfucker, fucking gave me a prostate orgasm, I never in my _life_ …”

And he trails off, nestling his face between Richie’s shoulder blades. 

“Does this mean you wanna date me?” 

“Yes!” Eddie exclaims, far too loudly, but he doesn’t even notice, or care about being heard, the madman. Richie thinks he may have broken his brain and he’s _so_ happy. “I mean, I was already gone on you, like I said, I _love_ you, so you could’ve just starfished and I would’ve happily humped your thigh or whatever but you had to go and– with your fucking _hands_ –”

“I’m a little concerned now, for real,” Richie says, still grinning. “You don’t ever compliment me sincerely. Was the sex actually terrible?”

“I’m so tired and I don’t think I can come again but I want you to fuck me, like, right now,” Eddie says. “Jesus. Fuck me to sleep.”

“You’re a changed man,” Richie says. 

Eddie sighs. He sounds forlorn. “I am. I think I have no choice but to be really nice to you now so this is hard for me, as you can imagine.”

“You’re loopy,” Richie accuses. “You haven’t slept and I apparently just destroyed half your brain cells. You’ll be back to your usual ornery self in the morning.”

“Fucking hope not,” Eddie says. He’s quiet for a while, sighing and letting his eyes slip shut. But his wandering mind brings him to a topic he thinks he should broach sooner rather than later. “Hey, Rich, I should probably tell you something.” Richie already knows what he’s going to say and he tries not to laugh, biting his lip as he smiles wide. “I already kissed you but you don’t remember it.”

Richie has no idea what would be a normal way to react to this news, if he didn’t already know it. After a moment of contemplation, he cranes his head around to stare at Eddie and says, “ _Whaaaat?_ ” 

(Nailed it.)

Eddie grimaces. “Yeah. It was when you first fell to the ground, after the deadlights. I guess I thought– you remember when Ben… with Bev? When we were kids?”

“I think about it all the time,” Richie says in a sultry voice and Eddie snorts. “Okay, let’s move past that joke,” Richie says, grinning. “You were saying? Did you kiss me out of the deadlights or something?” 

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Tried to.”

“But I didn’t remember,” Richie says, clicking his tongue ruefully. 

“Yep.” Eddie looks at his face, eyes flickering to his lips. He wants to kiss Richie again so Richie beats him to it, ducking forward. 

“So, our friends,” Richie says when he pulls back. “They all saw you kiss me and never mentioned it? Did you blackmail them into silence?”

Eddie laughs. “Um. No, I think… I don’t think everyone saw it. Maybe they just thought I was giving you mouth to mouth or something.”

“Uh huh.” Richie can’t stop smiling. Neither can Eddie. 

“Shut up. Go to sleep.” Eddie shoves Richie until he turns back onto his side so he can cuddle up behind him. He goes silent and within thirty seconds he’s breathing heavily at Richie’s back, his arms going lax around him.

* * *

It continues to fade slowly, the telepathy, and it’s a bittersweet relief to Richie. After months, the times when he can feel what Eddie feels are few and far between, only at emotional peaks. And that might just be due to the fact that he knows him so well. Richie could write the book on Eddie Kaspbrak, and even as the supernatural link between them fades, their relationship grows stronger, so he knows what Eddie is thinking by only glancing at him, meeting his eye across a crowded room. Fucking cliche, but it’s true. Eddie has a way of being ridiculously expressive with little expended effort. He’ll turn to face Richie with his straight mouth and brows and his permanent scowl-dimples and Richie instantly has a direct line into his mind. Most of the time it’s bitchy—a subtle ‘can you believe this shit?’ while they’re out in public—but sometimes the corner of his mouth twitches up and his eyes sparkle and that says, ‘I’m glad that you’re here to witness this bullshit with me.’ That’s probably Richie’s big grand thesis statement on relationships, if he had to have one. Maybe he’ll use it for a standup set someday.

It takes Richie a while to make up his mind, and he goes back and forth, but ultimately he decides not to tell Eddie that he ever could read his mind. He believes that, if their roles were reversed, he wouldn’t want to know. He’d want to keep living with some dignity in tact, and he’d trust Eddie to carry his secrets, with grace, all the way to the grave. So Richie will do that for him. Sometimes he slips up and references knowledge he only learned through the mind-reading, but it never gives Eddie pause. Eddie tells him pretty much everything anyway. 

(And it’s not like Richie has become a lot worse at sex, which would have been a notable giveaway. The superpower got him off to a good start but now he’s learned to read Eddie in all the normal, non-invasive ways, and Eddie no longer hesitates to tell Richie exactly what he wants. It’s a good tradeoff, earned after much happy labor.)

They’ve been living in LA for a few months now, sharing Richie’s apartment in the Valley, which has gradually absorbed touches of Eddie’s personality until it really started to feel like theirs. Eddie’s clothes take up slightly more than half the real estate in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom, and he turns Richie onto pour-over coffee in the morning, relegating his old coffee pot to the top shelf in the pantry. 

Eddie starts to get unsettlingly in-tune with Richie, too, anticipating his moods and finishing his sentences. “I hate how,” Eddie told him one night when they were lazing about and chatting in bed, “I always know exactly what you’re gonna say but it still makes me laugh.” Richie cracked up at that because, like all of Eddie’s best compliments, it sounded a little mean. Eddie swatted at his arm and insisted, “I’m not joking.” That was also extremely Eddie: to say the funniest thing Richie had ever heard and then get pissy when Richie laughed. 

Now that Richie thinks about it, they were like this as kids, too, the uncanny ability to read each other that only came from really knowing each other. It took them a while to fall back into the habit this time around. 

One evening in early February, Richie comes home to find Eddie unpacking take-out pho from the hole-in-the-wall place around the corner. The smell of the broth already has him weak in the knees as he hurries to kick off his shoes by the door. “I was just craving this earlier today,” Richie says by way of greeting, strolling into the kitchen. “I was gonna text you. Can you read my mind, or something?”

“Nah, you’re just predictable,” Eddie says. He’s replating the noodles and bean sprouts and other toppings in actual bowls because he’s philosophically opposed to eating out of styrofoam. 

“Well.” 

Richie sneaks past him and Eddie, anticipating the kiss that Richie was planning to plant on his temple as he passed, cocks his head to one side, for easy access. Richie kisses his temple, lips brushing over his hairline. He’s not sure who initiated this little routine, or when both of them became fully aware of its status as a routine. But he likes it. 

“You are, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr: [skeilig](https://skeilig.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter: [skeilig_](https://twitter.com/skeilig_)


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